Rob: How about, how does extreme wealth affect relationships between individuals?
CC: Well I think it in a way, we're at risk of commodifying or you know creating sort of calculus in our interactions. I mean one thing is a limit, people very rarely create intimate relationships across social class and across race. There's more of that happening, but if you're circumstances, if you were raised poor in economically insecure family and your partner is from an economically privileged family, there's a lot of work that has to happen for people to overcome some of those differences. And I think, the economic pressures that it puts on people who are non-wealthy and at the same time you have affluent families who can help their children in 101 different ways, get all kinds of head starts and advantages so it creates these sort of families that are all focused on leveraging their privilege as much as possible so that their children can catapult into the affluent and owning classes. So it makes sort of the family life into kind of a business of leveraging privilege. Oh we have to do this, we have to do that, I see that in the top 10% families. A huge amount of stress placed on these kids to become over achievers and they're looking around and saying look in an insecure unequal society, you better do everything you can to make sure your kids get into that upper slot because look what's going on. People are seeing that life for their children isn't going to be as good as it was for them. Or that they're going to be locked in poverty and it creates a kind of stress. Now you see all these young people in college overstressed and committing suicide, you know where are we going here? It's just the main bottom line, Rob, to all we're talking about, is it simply doesn't have to be this way. We have to imagine a culture and a society and family outside of these driving forces. We have to reclaim that as much as possible and try to live in that way.
Rob: And what do you imagine that would look like? I'm not talking about little tweaks to the system, I'm talking if we could really create a new system, what would it look like?
CC: Well I think people would live lives where we would we remember that the most essential things are about our human relationships and connections with others and with nature. We would live without these deep disconnections and divisions between humans and the natural world. We would live in harmony with one another and it would be a radically different life. We would, because you know we're here to be together. And to delight in the gifts of creation, I mean of nature and there's amazing food and abundance and life all around us. We're here to enjoy the gift, to help one another for whatever reason if people are unable to enjoy those gifts, to sort of create a society that community at the local level and at the larger level where people can all share those gifts. And that is our purpose for being here. It is not to keep score, it is not to accumulate the most toys before we die. It's not to walk over as many people as possible and say that you're the winner. That's not why we're here. So I think it's, we periodically can get glimpses of what that life is like.
Rob: You know one of the things that I've written a lot about in the last couple years is psychopaths, sociopaths and narcissists. There's a movie The Corporation, have you seen it?
CC: Yes, oh yeah.
Rob: And I wonder whether you're going to see more of those kinds of people at the top of the wealth pyramid, are there more people likely to be narcissistic and sociopathic and psychopathic who are billionaires?
CC: Yeah I think that both, our current system enables pathological people to rise to the top but it also reinforces that behavior. So it sort of, you know, you have a anti-social behavior is over representing in the very very top. Part of my organizing work with the Patriotic Millionaires is to say, lets help shift the culture. Let's not create a system that rewards the most greedy, most anti-social, most disconnected person. Let's reward, lets create a society that rewards cooperation and mutuality. Not rewards it but just celebrates it and affirms it and makes it possible for people for the better angels of our nature to rise through that system. So that's, you know I agree with you Rob, but I think the stuff, the sort of interpersonal sociological side of this is really really important and keep coming back to that question, what kind of society do we want to be, and what kind of lives do we want to lead. I think those are the foundational questions that help us think about why does our current system reward all the wrong things.
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